When It Comes to School Discipline, Bloomberg's Motto Is Safety First

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

Published: September 18, 2002

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that the Department of Education would aggressively ferret out and punish disruptive students in the public schools, particularly those in schools with high rates of criminal violence, and hold the principals more accountable for reducing disciplinary problems within their schools.

To that end, the mayor announced the creation of the Office of School Safety and Planning, which will be charged with creating safety plans and disciplinary procedures for children who disrupt classrooms with poor behavior. The new office will supplement the system's Division of School Safety, a unit that began reporting to the Police Department in 1999. It will be run by Benjamin B. Tucker, a former official in the federal Justice Department.

In March, the Police Department reported a 6.6 percent increase in major crimes in the schools from July 1, 2001, to March 2001, over the same period the year before. Reports of weapons offenses increased by 11 percent, and reports of misdemeanor assaults increased by 34 percent, the statistics said.

Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday, however, that new Police Department data show that over the last two years, all school-based crime dropped by 15 percent.

''A prerequisite to learning is students and teachers coming into schools that have a safe and orderly environment,'' the mayor said yesterday. ''Kids should be worried about pop quizzes, not about their own safety. That's why we must make every classroom in this city a safe place where students and teachers are free to do their work.''

The Department of Education will also use a new data-driven strategy, known as SchoolSafe, to identify schools with the highest rates of criminal incidents. Those schools account for a third of all school-based crimes, the mayor said yesterday, and also tend to have the lowest academic performances.

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani pressed the school system to use computer tracking, as he did with Compstat program in the Police Department, to identify crime trends.

''It will let us know where problems exist, and will be used to hold the chancellor, the district superintendents, the principal, the teachers and our students responsible,'' Mr. Bloomberg said of SchoolSafe.

The mayor said the statistics would be available to the public. ''We will put out good news and we will put out bad news,'' Mr. Bloomberg said, ''and anybody that's ashamed of putting out the bad news just shouldn't be working here.''

Mr. Bloomberg announced his new plans with Mr. Tucker, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and John Feinblatt, the criminal justice coordinator, in front of the William H. Taft High School in the South Bronx. No one from the school, which the mayor described as among those with a poor safety record, was invited to participate, which seemed to imply that the mayor and his deputies were putting the school -- and those like it -- on notice.

Mr. Tucker will be looking at some of the biggest noneducational problems in the schools, such as disciplinary problems and low attendance, and putting pressure on principals and district superintendents to reduce both. The unit will develop what Mr. Bloomberg described as a ''graduated scale of punishment'' for students who violate rules, as well as ways to use after-school programs and other initiatives designed to reduce truancy and violence, run by community-based organizations and other city agencies.

The Division of School Safety will continue to provide and supervise school safety officers.

A state law adopted in April 2001 gave teachers the power to remove disruptive students from their classrooms and send them to ''in-school suspension centers'' for up to four days. But many schools have delayed creating such centers because of budget cuts and overly vague instructions from the Department of Education. Even in schools that do have suspension centers, many teachers have not bothered removing students because under the law, they must first try less severe methods of dealing with disruptive behavior, carefully document the behavior and have formal approval from their principal.

While Mr. Bloomberg conceded that suspending disruptive children is difficult, he suggested that they could be removed from their classrooms or forced to do ''community service'' within their schools. ''They don't have to stay in the same classrooms as kids who want to learn, nor do they have to have all the same privileges as kids who want to learn,'' Mr. Bloomberg said. ''We are going to instill the discipline needed to teach and to learn.''

Using data to track problems in schools is not new. Harold O. Levy, the former chancellor, frequently received compilations of incident reports from throughout the school system that pointed out the most violent schools.

Involving other city agencies in the Department of Education's programs is expected to be a trend under the new school management structure; Mr. Bloomberg gained control of the city's schools in June.

Mr. Tucker was most recently an associate professor of criminal justice at Pace University. He recently served as the deputy director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing in the Justice Department. He has also been deputy assistant director for law enforcement services of the mayor's Office of Operations and held various jobs in city government, including work as a New York City police officer.

Photo: Benjamin B. Tucker of the new Office of School Safety and Planning was welcomed by Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. (Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times)